Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday March 23, 2008 @08:14AM
from the too-busy-monitoring-traffic dept.

The New York Times is running a story about how hope is fading for the implementation of municipal wireless access in cities across the US. Major cities and small towns alike are finding that ISPs are withdrawing from such plans due to the low profitability of ventures that are similar to Philadelphia's incomplete network. We've previously discussed Chicago's and San Francisco's wireless status, and also some of the stumbling blocks other cities have faced. From the Times:
"In Tempe, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., for example, hundreds of subscribers have found themselves suddenly without service as providers have cut their losses and either abandoned their networks or stopped expanding capacity. EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that 'the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction.' Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed."

WiFi just isn't a good technology for ubiquitous Internet, which is what they want to be providing. It's fine for covering a coffee shop, but for this kind of scheme to be cost-effective they need to cover at least a city block with a single access point.

They're facing competition at both ends. They can't sell the service as 'Internet access in that place where you really want it' because often 'that place' already has free WiFi. They can't sell it as 'Internet access everywhere' because they don't have the coverage and their competitors, the mobile phone companies, do. Always-available Internet via my mobile phone costs about the same, per month, as via my cable modem (albeit with slower speeds and much smaller caps). For people who are willing to pay for Internet to be available all the time, that's a much better option than WiFi.

Very true. City-wide WiFi makes very little sense given how US cell providers are trying quite hard to roll-out 3G/3.5G/4G services. Right now, those are a little on the expensive side, but competition and better technology will eventually drive them lower.

Hotspots are a bit more sensible, but I still think those will eventually disappear with ubiquitous cell phone data coverage.

Hotspots are a bit more sensible, but I still think those will eventually disappear with ubiquitous cell phone data coverage.

Everyone keeps talking about the death of the hotspot, but they are busier than ever. However, only as a value add... Look in any Panara Bread and tell me the hotspot is struggling. Any hotel. The hotspot is alive an well, but the paid model is struggling. Even Starbucks with the new AT&T is free for many people.

About 20 years ago, the first mobile phone service in Britain was something called Hutchison Rabbit, which only worked from hotspots. That dissapeared rapidly when the cell phone companies started offering city-wide coverage on 1st generation analogue networks.

With time and experience, the coverage problems were resolved. And the cost of rolling out these networks was quite low - tiny compared to the costs of rolling out the 3G networks

Coverage is an easy problem to solve. You just need a lot of access points. A really, really, large number, in fact. Walking around campus, I see access points in almost every room. Looking into the distance, I can see the cell tower that gives coverage to the campus and most of the city. Individual access points might be cheaper than cell towers, but the amount needed to cover a given area aren't when you factor in the cost of wiring them all up and the cost of sending someone out to fix them when they are damanged (much easier to secure and diagnose faults with fewer towers). Since WiFi uses unregulated spectrum, you also have to put up with the fact that microwaves, private access points, and so on can all interfere with your network. If someone starts jamming your UMTS tower then you can get them arrested.

The only way to describe the experience is that it is like paying $21.95 a month for stealing your neighbor's wireless: most pages end up timing out, and forget about anything that requires low latency. Sshing or mstscing is out of the question.

If done right, municipal wireless could be fantastic. But, it seems that a intentionally half-harted effort was made to burn people off of the idea.

However, in 1903, when the tower structure was near completion, it was still not yet functional due to last-minute design changes. Tesla intended for the tower to demonstrate how the ionosphere could be used to provide free electricity to everyone without the need for power lines. Morgan, who could not foresee any financial gain from providing free electricity to everyone, balked. Construction costs eventually exceeded the money provided by Morgan, and additional financiers were reluctant to come forward.

And the fact that WWI broke out didn't help either...

Even if he could get it working on a mass scale, there was no way to tell if people were using it for free or how much they were using. I suppose in retrospect they could have put a meter on the other side of the customer power receiver, but the way Tesla envision is that the devices would be independent so putting a meter on each and every light bulb would be impractical.

With wireless, they can at least track mac addresses and force a radius login, but it still has similar problems so its easy to see why businesses are reluctant to move forward with it.

I'd personally would prefer less extra energy being transmitted through the air, but that isn't going to happen.Plenty of problems besides physical, there's the actual business plan and the business you'd be competing against.

Free wifi - small and large non-broadband ISPs put out of business in no time.Security of financial gains (same as Tesla) - black market receivers or spoofed mac addresses. People sharing or stealing premium accounts.Cell phone companies - In my area, for $59.99+ you get Sprint Mobile

Two questions:
1. Could his idea work? I just uh, have a device that gets power from the air where-ever? No, uh, destruction of the human race?
2. If it cost a kabillion, ultimately, should we care? Or, is this what we really want/need?
3. Isn't this really an amazing inventor's last years doing some kind of "it's coming real soon now, boss" kind of thing?

The point of his invention wasn't that it gave you free power in unlimited supply, it was that it allowed you to tap into the power of the Niagra Falls dam from anywhere on the earth without the need to create any transmission infrastructure. How much is it worth to stop building and maintaining those structures? How much is it worth to get all that metal back and have the opportunity to use it elsewhere? How many natural sources of power would become practical to exploit where they previously were not?T

"That was the promise of Tesla and his invention. The reason we don't have it? You can't put a meter on it."Ummm...No the reason that we don't have it is that it doesn't and can not work.It is based on physics that just don't work.Tesla was brilliant but he was also a crack pot.

They are not trying to make a practical wireless power tranmistion system!Maybe you should read the website you posted."Program Purpose

HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.

The HAARP program is committed to developing a world class ionospheric research facility consisting of:

its the one of the main reasons Tesla's wireless power transmission never got serious funding and interest by investors.

It couldn't have been because broadcast power was a crackpot idea even when it came from the mind of a Tesla.

How much power would have had to be pumped into these towers to supply a relatively compact suburban population of five or six thousand households?

Wireless power transmission via ionosphere wave guiding and earth return could work. There is nothing unsound about that part. It is quite possible he was more successful in his limited demonstrations than people give him credit for. The problem is that obviously no more power could be exacted from the system than is supplied into it, so it is no free lunch. Further, there would be transmission losses, due to a large variety of reasons (anything that happens to absorb the frequency used for example, as wel

Free and open? "Open" I can understand, but "free"? Where did you get that idea? Even when I was in school I paid for access via tuition. Government supported access isn't "free" either, you just don't pay directly. Nothing is free.

Although I'm no fan of corporate greed somebody, somewhere has to pay for the service.

There is no distinction between free speech and free beer. They are the same. The distinction is a con. Capitalism hates plenty, because you can't sell something that is plentiful. So organizations either restrict supply, or reduce production, or if necessary buy laws preventing unrestricted supply, all in an effort to achieve control and leverage. Which is what money is an abstraction of.Oh, and I've been working for a living for 17 years. I've worn A LOT of different shoes in that time, which is pro

Im fully aware that nothing truly free in this world. ( even if its not monetary, effort is required )

In this case I'm using the word "free" as in no separate bill and unlimited use. You just turn on and tune in, so to speak. Its a 'practical' definition of the word free. Of course for visitors to the city, it would be even more free for them. ( and yes, i know they would be paying sales taxes on their meals, bla bla bla, but lets not split hairs too far here ).

... as long as the city isn't run by idiots and/or politicians who have been bought out by he local ISP conglomerates.

In my city [fred-ezone.com], which had the foresight to not only build a municipal WiFi network but also run it themselves without profit-mongering corporate overlords, the municipal network not only breaks even, it makes a net profit. This is because the same infrastructure that powers the municipal WiFi (the city-wide fibre-optic ring), has oodles of extra capacity, which the city leases to local companie

If they think there isn't money to be made (and can't figure out the potential of giving cable/DSL subscribers free WLAN access on the road as an extra, much like Fon [fon.com] does), well, then, as has been proposed years ago, just let someone else do the job, such as the Baptists [pbs.org].

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.Municipal-supplied Internet makes sense only where1) there would be a demand at a particular price, and private enterprise is not capable or willing to offer it at that price, or2) where a government-sanctioned monopoly is necessary to generate such a demand.

The first generally requires a taxpayer subsidy. The second would mean outlawing wireless or both wireless and wired Internet access citywide except through the government-granted monopoly. This is the case wi

True, but think of it as "city trash pickup". Of course, a city could just require by law everyone to take their own trash to the landfill like some rural areas, but if it was deemed important enough they could instead have a referendum to raise a tax (sales, property, or income) to pay for weekly trash pickup.

Now some city dwellers may balk at the idea because they can just take the trash to the landfill themselves and save the tax money, but most cities don't work like that so their only recourse is to fight the referendum or city hall legislation. If it passes, the trash pickup truck comes once and week and picks up garbage on the sidewalk regardless of who put it there (could be someone out of town though probaly illegal if they did it regularly) and pick up any amount (some cities have limits of what they pick up but they generally don't go out and report if you left one bag or 5) and they still come by your street even if you didn't put out a bag.

The same thing with Wifi, if a city deems it a reasonable service they can levy a tax and put it to a referendum. If the citizens don't like it they can vote against it, but if it passes then its just like garbage pickup. Not everyone will use it like everyone else (if at all... personally some weeks I'm hard pressed to even put a single trash bag out but I still pay the city tax for trash pickup) and its also going towards out of towners coming into the city and throwing their cups into public trash cans.

So no... Its not a free lunch, but its fine if a city wants a service paid for by tax. You don't see Waste Management complaining that the government holds a monopoly on trash pickup services. Now the service is most likely subcontracted out to the lowest bidder, but in effect it is a monopoly for that city.

The problem with most of these city ones like the Earthlink one in Philadelphia is that they are treating it and expecting income like a regular ISP which intends to make a profit.

It would have been better if Philadelphia had a referendum to use some of the city wage tax to go for free wifi and then explained to Earthlink how much of the taxes they would get rather than expected income from monthly services from individuals who may or may not cancel their account next month.

Except that there is no penalty for everyone else if you don't provide tax-funded WiFi. If you don't collect the garbage, there will be a certain group of individuals who don't take their trash to the landfill, but just throw it out the window (see: 12th century Europe). So far, there doesn't seem to be a penalty to the city for not providing WiFi. That COULD change in the future, but it seems unlikely.

Most taxpayers don't want to see their money going to subsidize a few people who want to use a laptop in the park, even if that's not really the point. And using anything other than a property tax that included business property wouldn't be fair to people who don't live in the area (you mentioned a wage tax - which is almost always a death sentence for local job growth in a struggling economy).

If these municipalities were really serious, they would partner with someone who already has a wide area network in place (like Verizon or Comcast in the case of Philadelphia). For them, it would be incremental revenue, not primary. Pay them enough to get a couple of techs trained to maintain the system, give them some manner of exclusivity and limited liability, and DON'T make them provide end-user tech support. However, the muni could (and should) demand coverage minimums, QOS/uptime requirements, "openness" etc.

Of course, that would require one to admit that networking is hard, expensive, and low margin.

Where I live the free wifi came about as a very nicely negotiated deal by the city and the company that provides wifi for the local departments and emergency services. In the RFP that was put out for bid, part of the contract to provide a secure wireless network (for police, fire, rescue, building dept., and code compliance) the city insisted that the provider arrange for Free public wifi for the whole city. They just finished testing and are starting roll-out this month. We'll see how it goes. I can see on

Municipal-supplied Internet makes sense only where1) there would be a demand at a particular price, and private enterprise is not capable or willing to offer it at that price, or2) where a government-sanctioned monopoly is necessary to generate such a demand....3) the electricity/gas/water counters in the buildings can be read wirelessly, (you fire lots of people going from house to house right now)4) Street/traffic lights can be connected that way5) Speeding/traffic light violation cameras etc6) Public tr

3) the electricity/gas/water counters in the buildings can be read wirelessly, (you fire lots of people going from house to house right now)4) Street/traffic lights can be connected that way5) Speeding/traffic light violation cameras etc6) Public transport informations (bus arrivals/delays reporting at every stop)7) Traffic/parking information boards updatingtons of other stuff that's done right now by running a cable to each and every destination.

I'll give you 3 and read-only versions of the rest, but wireless "write" for traffic-control, signs, etc. is just asking for a denial of service attack or worse.

Sure, you could do it wirelessly and do it right, but there are security issues that must be addressed that are much less of a problem if these devices are controlled through a closed-circuit wire. Encryption helps but it's just a start.

Even read-only introduces privacy issues for #3, particularly if the meter is on private property and not visibl

Even read-only introduces privacy issues for #3, particularly if the meter is on private property and not visible from public property.

Lots of countries have that (mine included), only with proprietary radio, where a car runs through the streets reading the meters. So I guess anybody could analyze that when the car runs through and read my water meter.

If there were just a couple more Linksys users in every neighborhood, we'd have city-wide access in every city in America! From my house right now, I "see" eight wireless signals. The three that are unsecured are all labeled "Linksys".

This is true and advertiser could even help foot the bill for proof of access point usage. So yeah it can be very profitable, no doubt.But then we have things like the RIAA and kiddy porn FBI tactics http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/20/2323247 [slashdot.org] and telcos violations of privacy at the request of some government official...that work against this sort of open unsecured access.

I think the backing down of such plans is evidence of things to come, regarding the genuine reasons for such a change in supp

I still believe that city-wide WiFi is an achievable and useful thing, but only if it is provided by the people for the people. The amount of work and the cost for any individual who allows the public to connect to the internet through an already existing wireless access point is very low and the benefit of being able to use other people's access points for free is high. Politicians should not seek to fund commercial WiFi deployments. They should provide legal protection to people who share their network connection with the public.

"The amount of work and the cost for any individual who allows the public to connect to the internet through an already existing wireless access point is very low and the benefit of being able to use other people's access points for free is high."

I agree with this, but I don't think that individuals who have an existing wireless access point should let others use theirs for free. If they provide the service, then they should be able to charge for it.

or you can think of it as this:
If everyone pays for internets at home and everyone shares then what you pay for at home gets you internets virtually anywhere (where there is houses or whomever has access points). Now this does sound a bit much to ask of stingy american people. But this type of act if planned out correctly can be used to potentially get rid of any data caps that ISPs put down (I hope) due to the expectation that people will use other people's connections. The only problem with this idea

I agree with this, but I don't think that individuals who have an existing wireless access point should let others use theirs for free.

That's for those individuals to decide. That's not for *you* to decide.
If you want to charge your neighbors for your connection, that's fine, more power to you, and that's already happening. My ISP [speakeasy.net] already allows me to do this, and they say -- they'll even take care of the billing of my neighbors should I want them to handle that part (at the rate of my choosing of course)

Yep. They are. They're still offering dialup at $21.95 a month (with various ways to get that lower through comittments or bundling with other services.) They also have a very interesting $49.95 a month offer in select areas to give you DSL (at whatever speed your copper line supports) and also put plain old telephone service on that line. In Comcast cable areas, they're offering use of Comcast's internet service bundled with Earthlink applications services (for example,

When even Google pulls back, it's a bad business model even with advertising-driven models.

Face it, 802.11 is a LAN technology, not a MAN technology. Lipstick on that pig, even with cool mesh network attempts, isn't going to make it better. It was designed for local radial-cellular access by its channelization, and it's not good for covering wide areas. My sentiments go out to Strix and Firetide; both have decent models to make it wider. Cities have to figure out that broadband access is a utility, not an option.

They've been on the verge of citywide wireless here in Miami Beach for that past two years, but I'm starting to suspect it will never happen. It's too bad, I was looking forward to just canceling my own internet and living off the public dime...

The ISPs fought tooth and nail against even modest municipal wifi limited to public areas like libraries and shopping districts, because they wanted to make money from it. So rather than municipally funded projects they promoted these ad-hoc "partnerships" that didn't, in the end, make money.

That's why the United States is behind many other major industrialized countries in Internet speeds. Because companies in the United States care about the $$$, not about innovation or advancing technology.

I guess the ISPs decided trying to wiretap MANs would be too hard because they have no way of proving that a certain data packet came from a certain person, and because then everyone wouldn't have to pay outrageous ripoff prices for a watered down, censored Internet...

No, but other countries are often better at realising that infrastructure is not meant to make a profit directly. If you invest in infrastructure then you can increase the earning power of the individuals and companies in an area, and thus increase tax revenue (without increasing tax rates) and then fund more infrastructure.

Treating infrastructure like a product is bad for the economy in the long run, but good for those who own the infrastructure in the short term (see Hydraulic Despotism).

So? This is hardly some great tragedy. If there's demand for it, people will be willing to pay for it. If not, there won't. Who cares if some country out there has a govt subsidized technology that I don't really need right now? If it's good enough it'll find its way here because there'll be demand for it.

Don't force feed me things I don't want, especially in the form of "taxation" to pay for technology.

I just signed on with NTT DoCoMo for about $8 a month to get Mopera/Mzone which is basically 11Mbps 802.11 access points at places like KFC around town (Tokyo). There definitely aren't enough but maybe one near most major stations. However they require a lousy browser-based login (works automatically with their utility though) so I can't use my Skype phone.

It is very cool, and still only about $15/mo. even if you aren't already a customer of their FOMA phones.

Free is good but also maybe a very low monthly fee ($5/mo.?) to a general fund that would be divided among routers/isps doing this? Whatever, the question is find a way to get it done. I never thought ISPs would make much money out of this myself but once you get onto 11Mbps you get addicted. I use the windows app they give you to look at a detailed map of the city and find where the nearest point is. So far Tully's and Kentucky are my faves!

For some time now I've been taking part in WIMAX trials here in Hamilton Ontario. [community-media.com] This too was trumpeted as a glorious thing that would change the face of our city, bring us into the high tech 21st century etc.

In practice although WIMAX seems to work OK (aside from a real lag much of the time, which may just be bad server configuration by Primus Communications), My sense is that the company isn't really committed to it. I doubt that there will be a serious public roll out.

There was a perfect opportunity to provide wireless access for everyone... the Fed just auctioned off the very spectrum needed to make it a reality. What happened?

Did anyone consider this? I know Google had mentioned it and it was a meme floating around that they might buy up the spectrum and offer *free* wifi everywhere, supported by ads of course... if the States or a collective of cities had gotten together and purchased the bandwidth, it really could have been free.

Maybe I'm missing something? Was it not a great opportunity from a technical POV? or did all our local governments just drop the ball?

That's why I put free inside asterisks like so: *free*Obviously it's not free. What it could be however is significantly discounted due to economies of scale. If all the municipalities bought it in bulk and engaged in a uniform plan with uniform hardware to provide a standard level of access to everyone... well it could be a lot cheaper than your monthly bill... say paying $50 per year in taxes instead of $50/month.

With wireless/radio based connections this works... it's a general solution for a general pro

The cellular data networks already have the coverage, the wifi will only be redundant. Pretty soon all phones will be HSPA compatible. Laptops already have it with (even if you don't count the crappy edge network).

Trying to create a network by installing hotspots every 150 feet or even every 1000 feet or so if you extend the transmission range over public spectrum where any Joe may interefere with it with their own cordless phone, microwave and/or home WiFi router was a silly endeavour.

Now doing the same thing with public spectrum WiMax or UltraWideBand could work for 2-4 years until the next wireless technology improves upon it. It might work because it can cover much greater distances, so less antennas, and better ones (MiMo) and most importantly, tower equipment is expensive enough (though not very), that the average home user isn't going to be able to afford a transmitter to compete with it.

There is one gotcha, and that is that sharing some 50 Mbits over 3-20 KM would never work because most Metro cities are too densely populated. Unless you use deep packet inspection at endpoints and allow only SMTP and true HTTP/s traffic and deny all else. South Korea has standardized on WiMax for wireless, not WIFi, and their network is mostly complete.

Ultimately, there is a reason why Telco's pay Billions for private spectrum, because there will be (in theory) zero interference, and zero competition - although Google changed the latter slightly, lately.

PS. If you want to learn way more on WiMax read the wikipedia page, it is very informative.

I never understood the notion of "low profitability" completely. Isn't profitability good, whether it's 5 percent or 100 percent? I understand that a company or individual can do something more efficiently and make larger profit margins, but a profit is a profit. If a company operates with all its liabilities and expenses including land, labor, and capital, and manages to turn a profit, then that company functions correctly.

As someone who recently moved back to Mountain View (Google-ville) and used Google WiFi initially, my experience is that it is not ready to replace wired ISPs.

Indoor access via laptop is problematic, for all the normal coverage reasons. The Google router is right across the street on a lightpost, but it is tough to get a strong enough signal indoors. A wireless bridge place in the window facing their router solved the signal strength issues.

With a strong signal, it worked well much of the day. Not blazingly fast, but fast enough to be useful (~1Mbps). But, during high usage times, 7PM-10PM, it became unusable. Packet loss was terrible, so performance was too, and many sessions timed out completely.

And this is with a very mixed environment, most people I have talked to used Cable or DSL internet access. So, Google WiFi wasn't supporting the whole street. But, even with the subset of users, it was too much for their service to handle. I quickly decided to go for cable internet, and this is definitely the right choice for anyone needing Internet for business / critical usage.

Maybe it could work with other improvements, I don't know enough about their infrastructure to say for sure. Some thoughts:

- Uplink issues: I think Google routers hub back into their network via wireless links. Maybe that is the piece that is not holding up at peak times. If so, a better network back to the ISP may help.

- 802.11N may help: More bandwidth, longer range. Operating on the 5GHz band may also be less crowded with other networks, at least for now.

I seem to recall a spate of threatened lawsuits and opposition to municipalities rolling their own coverage because it was "anti-competitive" and would cut into the profits of large telcos. Now those same telcos are abandoning their plans as "unprofitable" leaving many municipalities with nothing. If I were a libertarian I'd feel some sense of confusion, even doubt about the power of "the market" that was much hyped when people were attacking municipal wi-fi as "big government intrusion.Instead I'll just

Whenever some piece of legislation is going to cut a little into profits, the corporations and their lackeys cry out "Free market! Free market!"These same people are more than happy to accept government contracts that turn their corporation into a monopoly in certain regions. How many people here use an ISP like Comcast and have no alternative for high speed internet?

I've seen people insist that there are no monopolized regions, that they literally do not exist anywhere, yet I have never lived in a house

Power of market and Free market capitalism are both wrongly used nowadays.During the days of Second BUS Bank of US) Free Banking was meant to mean that government does NOT intervene to help any ailing bank and that it treated all banks as equal businesses.i.e., If a bank failed to meet its outstanding obligations in FULL (in Specie in those days), it was to be immediately wound up, its assets sold and money to be distributed to creditors.No central bank assistance of any kind, No "forced mergers" with JP Mo

The poster (Soulskill)indicates that citywide wifi experiences "low profitability" and the article states that the providers have had to "cut their losses" indicating no profitability.

Which is it? Was this a bad idea (not sustainable under current funding), or are these telecomms just out to make a buck? Everyone knows these companies are out to screw the consumer at every chance (specifically Earthlink), but was that what caused the abandonment of municipal wifi?

Its too bad that people don't learn from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others. Likewise, its even more of a shame that they do not learn from the successes of others.

I live in Lawrence, Kansas [wikipedia.org], and just about anywhere I go within the 28.7 square miles of city, I can get a wireless signal from our local wireless ISP, Lawrence Freenet [lawrencefreenet.org]. The service is dramatically cheaper than the local cable company, and speeds are equivalent to DSL. There are routers on lightposts that you can communicate with either directly from your computer (if the signal is strong enough) or you can use a wireless bridge (which they rent and sell) to ensure a good connection. To top it off, you aren't fixed to one location with their service, you can take a laptop with you anywhere in the city, and if you see an access point, you can sign on. How much money did the city spend on this service? Zero. Nothing. This was completely financed by people who believed in it, and that is why it has been successful. With over 1300 current customers after only two years of existence, they are certainly doing things right.

Oh, and I'm posting this from a laptop connected to a Lawrence Freenet access point.

Take Cary NC for example, Time Warner kicks back 15% of their revenue to the city as some kind of licensing fee or whatever dubious name they give it. It's a kick back. They are not going to give up a portion of their internet revenue without cutting back on the kickback to the city so the city for all it's noise and NPR friendly agitprop about 'WiFi for the People! For Free!" isn't interested in getting that off the ground. I'm sure every other city with a similar arrangement is the same. And that's w/o co

This is just one more example of how private companies are hostile to the provision of public infrastructure. Previous examples have been electricity companies who artificially create shortages to drive up prices, privatized airports who steadily increase fees for airline and passenger use, water companies that increase prices to pay for the purchase of previously public assets....and so on.
If you ant something done that is essentially a service for the sake of service, not profit, then you really should